Automatic

I'm about 25 days into my '100 Days to Chess Improvement' now, so it's time to draw a clear picture of what exactly I'm trying to achieve.

Identifying the positional features on the board is relatively straight forward, they tend to be static. It's easy to say "that's an isolated Queen's pawn", because there is no c- or e- pawn. Doubled pawns, closed or open positions, even weak squares suitable for a Knight; once you know what these are, they're just sitting there on the board in plain view.

Not so with tactical motifs. While the presence of a Bishop pinning a Knight to it's Queen is simple enough, the dynamic nature of tactics means you have to visualise the pieces moving round a bit to identify them. Even a simple barrage requires you to count up the attackers and defenders, and play through the different capture sequences to see if something might come of it. So the purpose of attempting to absorb Fred Reinfeld's '1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations' is to be able to look at a board and see it's tactical 'parts and actions' at a glance.

Here's a random pretty picture:


You might look at it and instantly see "two animals, 4 legs each, big teeth and claws, orange with black stripes, tigers! (Siberian) day-time, snow on the ground - cold, aggressive poses...". Looking at a Chessboard and seeing it's tactical features should be like this too - automatic.

The first step toward this is to repeat '1001' until I am able to enumerate by name every tactical feature of the position for both sides, even those not featuring in the solution, then visualise all variations of the solution effortlessly. At this point it's not imprtant to find the perfect solution myself at the first attempt, although some assessment of the position, an idea where the solution should lie, is.

Working through the solution, take note of the motifs that were missed - even if the correct solution was found - and when doing the review positions note those that don't spark instant recognition and work through the solution more carefully.

Where do I hope this will lead me?

Firstly a solid foundation for finding tactics in previously unseen positions.

Most of these problems have variations which are either a single long but fairly straight branch, or a bush of many short branches. Solving them develops the visualisation and analysis skills that will help to calculate quickly and precisely in complex positions with more and longer branches at each turn.

When analysing master games, they usually don't bother - and why should they? - mentioning the 'simple' tactical features underlying the positional justification for moves. Tactics are the cog-wheels that whir silently unseen to animate the machina of the game. Tactics are the cornerstone for studying positional play. Tactics must be automatic.